Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Right-Wing Marxism

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There was a time when conservatism was defined as a lack of ideology, by which Russel Kirk meant ideology in the Marxist sense. The Marxist defined ideology as a set of beliefs that were assumed to be true, but were, in fact, the product of economic and social conditions of the time. The ideologue, whether he knew it or not, believed in a collection of things he assumed were true in all times and all places, but were only true in his time and place. Conservatives rejected this argument.

That was a long time ago. For generations now, conservatism has succumbed to that old Marxist understanding of ideology. What that usually meant is the so-called conservatives would figure out the position of the Left on some issue and then take an alternative position. Not necessarily the opposite, as they have always been careful to avoid being called reactionary by the Left. This is, of course, evidence that they are reactionary, but reactionaries have some self-awareness.

A good example of this is this piece in the American Conservative. The writer is someone calling himself Charles Marohn, but his friends call him Chuck. He is the president of something called Strong Towns, which promotes itself as an advocacy group in support of rebuilding local community. Of course, it is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Here is their tax filings. Their language and choice of media outlets suggest they are conservative or right-leaning.

The best one can say about it, however, is it is a mix of misguided libertarianism and Breitbart-tier reaction. Consider this line. “After all, there is no greater distortion of the market than local zoning codes, and there are few bureaucracies doing more harm to property rights and freedom than local zoning offices.” This is right out of libertarian market worship. An actual conservative would ask, “Do these local zoning laws reflect the attitudes and customs of the local community?”

Nowhere in the piece is there any discussion about what the local people may want or how these zoning laws fit in with local customs. Instead, the author is frazzled over the prospect that the market, peace be upon it, may be vexed with these laws. Even more vexing, suburban voters have somehow managed to get the Federal government to back these zoning laws. In this case, it means rules against building tenements and trashy commercial development in white suburbs.

In other words, his definition of conservative simply means opposing anything that impedes the marketplace. Further, he points out that these sorts of zoning laws started in the New Deal years. There’s where you see the Pavlovian aspect of modern conservatism. Instead of judging the thing in question against a set of accepted principles, they just ask if Democrats were for or against it. Conservative Inc. better hope the Left never takes a strong stance against suicide.

That’s where you see that conservatism, rather than being a rejection of ideology as the Marxists define it, has become an ideology, one that compliments and supports the prevailing ideology of the Left. In the case of single-family zoning laws, there is no consideration of their efficacy. The writer does not bother to ponder why these laws exist in the first place. Instead, he just assumes they are bad because the Left once supported them and they violate market absolutism.

Of course, he does not address why we have zoning laws prohibiting the demolition of the suburbs with tenement blocks. The Left destroyed those old white ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, by unleashing a black crime wave starting in the 1960’s that drove whites from the urban areas. Twenty years ago, the legendary quantitative blogger, La Griffe du Lion, pointed out just how quickly blacks began to prey on urban whites as their population grew.

At least with the Obama administration, they were honest about why they wanted to destroy the white suburbs with tenements full of blacks. They hated white people and they hoped to reclaim some urban real estate. The game is to change the zoning laws in these white suburbs, so builders can erect apartment blocks. The Federal government, coordinating with the local Democrat machine, then fills them with blacks from the nearest city, using Section 8 housing vouchers.

Toward the end of the piece, he writes, “The progressive left has discovered that single-family zoning has racist underpinnings. That’s great, because we should now have no problem finding common cause for repealing this most distorting of regulations, one that the federal government never should have forced cities to adopt to begin with.” Instead of using this observation to discuss why these zoning laws exist, he falls victim to the fallacy of Chesterton’s fence.

There is another part to the Marxist definition of ideology. Once one accepts that beliefs are shaped by conditions, you no longer have to think too much about the truth content of political beliefs. Your opponents are simply the victims of false consciousness, while your ideas reflect the interests of your side. This inevitably leads to both close-mindedness and fanatical zeal. Any questioning of your side is heresy, while the other side’s arguments are assumed to be without merit.

This is where conservatives find themselves today. They are confined to a moral ghetto created for them by the Left. On the one hand, any new ideas, especially those from the Right, are rejected out of hand. On the other hand, they are completely defined by their opposition to whatever the Left is doing at the moment, but snugly within the confines of the moral orthodoxy. Conservatism has been completely stripped of the ability to question and debate political reality.

This is also why conservatism has turned into a racket. The people inside this maze of right-wing institutions have been imprinted by ideology. They can only see the world in terms of partisanship, a term coined by Lenin, by the way. Of course, the same is true of left-wing institutions. They treat their enemy as an indefatigable foe that is always right there ready to pounce. In reality, both Left and Right are exhausted ideologies and exist like two drunks leaning on one another for support.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Covid Update

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As the inner party feverishly tries to create enthusiasm for a second panic over the coronavirus pandemic, it is a good time to take a look at what has actually happened with the virus to this point. It is easy to forget, given the fire hose of nonsense that comes at us every day, but we were all supposed to be dead by now. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us, a lot more than actually died. Instead, most of us are here, social distancing and wearing humiliation masks to please the rulers.

In fairness to the people who made the initial projections, the only way to get any attention in this age is to make outlandish claims. Everything about the modern media culture has evolved to reward the freaks, the crazy and the outlandishly dishonest, so the model makers probably felt they were doing the right thing. They wanted the rulers to treat the virus as a serious threat, so they were okay with rolling out doomsday predictions that were not grounded in reality.

That has not stopped so-called experts from putting out nonsense studies to feed the demands of alarmists. The under-counted fallacy will probably be with us through the election, as that promotes second wave fantasies. In realty, the death toll from the virus is probably overstated, but it is going down quickly nonetheless. That’s because of two things that we see with all pandemics. One is the most vulnerable die first and the other is herd immunity. Covid is following the same course.

A good example of the power of mass media to warp the truth is how the phrase “herd immunity” was quickly turned into an epithet. Even now, alarmist sneer about herd immunity as if it is voodoo. The fact is, the way forward for this thing was always going to be reaching an infection level that slowed the spread of the disease. The only question was how quickly it could happen, without creating problems in the health care system like shortages and overcrowding.

That was the whole point of the lock downs. There’s never going to be a vaccine and there was never going to be an eradication of the virus. We’ve been trying to come up with a vaccine for a coronavirus for a long time. Nothing has come close to working, so planning for one is foolish. Instead, the best approach is to get the young and healthy out there infecting one another and building up their immunity. By young and healthy, it means under 60 and free of serious diseases.

In other words, the lock downs were a dumb idea. Perhaps they were understandable in a panic, as politicians are stupid and like mischief. Now they make no sense at all, at least in terms of dealing with the virus. If there is going to be a second wave, it will be an economic wave. The inevitable Covid flare ups in pockets of the country this fall will simply be the result of slowing the natural spread of the virus and delaying the progress toward the Herd Immunity Threshold.

As an aside, herd immunity does not mean the entire herd must be exposed and develop antibodies. It can mean that, but it can also mean that everyone who could get sick and die from a disease, gets sick and dies. In this case, however, it simply means an infection level where the odds of an infected person contacting a non-infected person falls below a certain threshold. The virus, not having a ready supply of new hosts dies out before infecting the whole population.

For those interested, the panic over Covid is a useful primer on why mass democracy coupled with mass media is a suicide pact. If America was run by a dictator or even a junta, the first step in fighting the disease would be controlling the flow of information about the disease. The media would be tightly controlled and prevented from spreading fake stories about overrun hospitals and people dying in the streets. In fact, we may not even know there was a pandemic at all.

Second, and probably more important, attention whores with outlandish claims would have no platform to spread their nonsense. Instead, the people who know about these things would give their advice to the rulers, who would then make policy. The loons and cranks would be sent to a camp if they got out of line. No one making policy or advising on policy would have an incentive to get attention from the mobs. There would be no market for crazy talk and fear mongering.

That’s what we have seen with Covid. The sober minded virologist advising caution in public policy gets pushed aside in favor of TV clown with dubious credentials. Millions of innumerate people are on social media chattering with one another about facts that they don’t understand. The result of America’s Covid response has been an increase in the levels of stupidity in the public. Everyone is now dumber for having had to put up with months of ridiculous claims about the virus.

The fact is, this brilliant post from March was right all along. Months ago, it was clear that the lock down strategy would not do what was claimed. Even if it did slow the spread of the disease, that was not a good thing. The cost of locking down a country would be prohibitively high. If we lived in a just country, the curve benders would be rounded up by the ruler and executed. The right answer was to prepare the public and the hospitals to tough out what would be a very bad flu season.

That is the one bit of good news in all of this. The public is increasingly cynical about everything they hear from the ruling class. The lies and sadistic punishments in the virus panic moved a lot of people from partisan to hostile. The effort to gin up a phony second wave panic to help Joe Biden in the election will probably be met with a second wave of hostility, much bigger than the first. The ruling class spent what was left of its legitimacy on this virus panic.

In the end, what we have is a very expensive lesson in the folly of mass democracy and mass media. Both are based on the premise that the more stupid people you add to the mix, the greater the collective intelligence of the whole. It’s as if group intelligence works in series, rather than parallel. In reality, the more people participating in politics, the faster dumb ideas are created and allowed to zoom around the system. We’ve reached a point where our society is no longer able to perform the basics.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

And Don’t Come Back!

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In another highly coordinated effort, the tech oligarchs ritualistically banned a bunch of people and groups from their platforms yesterday. Of note, Reddit banned the Donald Trump fan club from their site. YouTube banned American Renaissance and Stefan Molyneux from their platform. Something called “Twitch” banned the Trump campaign team from its site. All of these people and groups have been accused of impiety by the people in charge of public morality, so they have been punished.

Of course, many of the proscribed have responded according to their role in the great morality play of the Left. They found somewhere on social media to express their outrage and hurt over being kicked off a left-wing platform. There were the denunciations of left-wing hypocrisy and the calls for free speech. The chorus played its role, amplifying the outrage of the proscribed. At this point, the only interesting thing about these rituals is the targets they select for punishment.

Reddit, for example, made an example of the TERF community. Those would be radical feminists who exclude men in sundresses. They were purged for the crime of accepting biological reality. Stefan Molyneux, who has refashioned himself into a street corner philosopher, was banned from YouTube allegedly for advocating violence. In reality, he was selected because YouTube has run out of popular heretics. They have so broken their site that even heretics are losing interest in it.

The important part of this is not the targets, but the ritual. As you see with Molyneux, they will claim a milquetoast libertarian actor is Hitler in order to fill the role in the morality tale. It’s not important that he is not actually Hitler. What matters is they have someone to parade around as a heretic on whom they can ritualistically heap their scorn and then chase from their midst. For all it matters, these recently proscribed people could be macramé enthusiasts or bird watchers.

That’s what people outside the halls of the one true faith fail to grasp. The people deciding to ban Jared Taylor spent no time listening to what he has to say or examining his videos for violations of their morality codes. They are physically incapable of being around those who dispute the tenets of the faith. Jared is just a blasphemer, an agent of the great evil against which they fight. The same is true in varying degrees for all of the people thrown off these left-wing sites.

For the people doing this, the only time they bother to listen to the damned is after the fact, when the condemned are complaining about their banning. Progressivism is a sadistic faith, fueled by the suffering of its enemies. You can be sure the various committees and working groups tasked with finding this round of heretics were replaying Moly’s Twitter performance over and over as they gratified themselves. He was playing his role like a legendary thespian at the peak of his ability.

It is the biggest problem facing those opposed to the new religion. Instead of accepting it as a religion, opponents insist on imposing their own sense of logic and reason onto the actions of these people. “They are banning us because they are afraid of what we have to say!” No, the people conducting these rituals have no idea what someone like Molyneux says in his videos. He could be speaking in tongues for all they care. He is not a person to them. He is a character in their morality play.

The rock heads and cranks on this side will dispute this, because that is what makes them rock heads and cranks. They will keep imposing their sensibilities on the other side, despite generations of evidence to the contrary. Worse yet, they will insist that these left-wing platforms are vital ground. We have to exhaust ourselves fighting to get on these platforms. Of course, that just means a steady supply of people ready to play the role of the damned in the next morality play.

The proper response to all of this is to simply leave these platforms. The argument is that these platforms are the public square, but that’s not true. No one goes on Twitter to have their mind changed about anything. People go on Twitter to have their opinions confirmed by people they already like. The same is true of YouTube. If you really enjoy Moly’s performances, you can always go to his site. This is how it worked up until about ten years ago. It’s how this site works.

Further, the proper response to de-platforming efforts is to ignore them. When you go public and moan about the attacks, the Left is exhilarated. They see the suffering as a trophy that keeps cheering for them. Sure, it is no fun to go through. No one wants to waste time moving servers or changing domain registrars, but publicly complaining about it does not make the burden lighter. It just encourages the people doing it to keep looking for fresh victims. It stimulates them.

Ultimately, our side joins the fight when we finally wake-up and accept the other side for what it is. The Left are not reasonable people. They are not operating from a set of fixed rules that can be mastered by an outsider. There is no beating them at their own game or on their platforms. These are evil people who are only motivated by the suffering of decent people. They feed on your frustration and your complaints. When you engage with them, you are giving them oxygen

The way forward is to reduce the number of contacts between them and us. Instead of going inside the walls of their domains to be fed upon like cattle, make them scale the walls of our domains. No, that does not mean building a new internet. It just means not going onto their platforms. Sure, they can attack Molyneux by going after his registrar or hosting company, but that is time consuming and often futile. It makes them work hard for the dopamine rush of tormenting the condemned.

That’s ultimately the battle we face. There’s no defeating the Left in the conventional sense of a fight. Instead, the goal is to exhaust them. Since a big part of what sustains them is the attention they get from their victims, not giving them that attention increases their cost of operation. The trouble is, many on our side is like a battered wife. They can only feel love when they are being pummeled. They have been conditioned to take the beating and then come back asking for more.

When our side sits it out, the results are impressive. Look at the riots. The Left was sure these riots would draw out “right-wing extremists” they could then use as a foil. When that did not happen, they tried inventing them, but failed to make it work. It’s hard to convince people that the black guys beating a white guy with a skateboard are actually white nationalists. It just underscored the fact that the only people in the streets are left-wing agitators and their pets from the vibrant community.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is why they have started banning people from their platforms again. The riots have been a terrible disaster for them. They fully expected a dozen Charlottesville-style events, with lots of bad guys they could parade around on their media platforms. Instead they got semi-literate savages and potheads claiming part of Seattle as a new country. This should be the model for all future interaction with the Left. Engage them in the shadows, never in public.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

GE: The Story Of America

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If you were to pick one company that symbolizes how America has changed and been changed over the last half century or so, it would be General Electric. The company founded by Thomas Edison is in many ways a microcosm of the American economy over the last century or more. It rose to become an industrial giant in the 20th century, the symbol of America manufacturing prowess. It then transformed into a giant of the new economy in the 1990’s, a symbol of the new America.

Today, General Electric is a company in decline. After a series of problems following the financial crisis of 2008, the company has steadily sold off assets and divisions in an effort to fix its financial problems. In 2019, Harry Markopolos, the guy who sniffed our Bernie Madoff, accused them of $38 billion in accounting fraud. The stock has been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial composite. Many now speculate that GE will end up in bankruptcy in order to reorganize.

For those interested in a longer discussion about the history of General Electric, Myth of the 20th Century did a podcast on the company. One aspect they did not cover is how General Electric transformed from a company that made things into a financial services company that owned divisions that made things. Like the American economy in the late 20th century, the company shifted its focus from making and creating things to the complex game of financializing those processes.

Like many companies in the late 20th century, General Electric found that their potential clients were not always able to come up with the cash to buy their products, so they came up with a way to finance those purchases. This is an age-old concept that has been with us since the dawn of time. Store credit is a way for the seller to profit from the cash poor in the market. He can both raise his price and also collect interest on the payments made by his customers relying on terms.

For American business, this simple idea turned into a highly complex process, involving tax avoidance strategies and the capitalization of the products and services formerly treated as business expenses. Commercial customers were no longer buying products and services, but instead leasing them in bundled services packages, financed at super-low interest rates and tax deductible. Whole areas of the supply chain shifted from traditional purchases to leased services.

For example, a local supplier of industrial goods used to own a warehouse to hold the products he supplied to clients. Inside would not only be the products, but material handling equipment like forklifts and shelving. Outside at the loading docks would be a fleet of big scary trucks used to deliver the products. Of course, to make it all work would be a staff of people loading and unloading trucks, moving product around the warehouse, making deliveries to clients and so on.

All of this would require a lot of money to acquire and maintain. That small local distributor would have millions tied up in assets. This is where the magic of cheap credit came into the economy. Companies like GE could go to these suppliers and unleash that capital tied up in those assets, by converting them into leased services. The trucks, for example, would no longer be purchased, but leased from a GE division that paid the taxes, did the repairs and provided spares in peak times.

As an aside, another aspect of this new leased economy is what happened with the people inside of it. That local supplier could not only lease his trucks and material handling equipment; he could lease his people. The building, the warehouse people, the administrative staff, the trucks, all of it, could be turned into a single lease payment for larger operators. This allowed the big players to muscle out the small players in just about every aspect of the supply chain.

What really made this new form of store credit work was both super-low borrowing rates for big players like GE, but also changes in the tax laws that allowed these lease payments to be treated like depreciation. The customer not only got the benefit of holding his cash he would normally use for asset acquisition; he could also get favorable tax treatment on the lease expense. To no one’s surprise, the big lobbyists for these changes in the tax laws were the financial services firms.

That is what GE became in the 1990’s. It was no longer a company that made stuff and financed it for select clients. It was a financial services firm that owned manufacturing facilities that supplied products it could finance. GE Capital became a massive commercial bank, not entirely regulated like a commercial bank and free to invent new financial services to meet its needs. They bought up manufacturing and commercial services companies, in order to monopolize their financing operations.

In the old economy, the credit system existed to serve the broader economy. In the new economy, the broader economy exists to serve the credit system. That which can be turned into a credit instrument increases in value, while that which cannot be bundled into a financial instrument loses value. Small players that provide specialized services lose value, while global players with easy access to credit increase in value. Everyone and everything serves the global credit system now.

This is what happened with General Electric as its credit empire grew. It was first and foremost a finance company. Since the flow of cheap credit was unlimited, the need to find new places for the credit became the point of GE. They bought companies in order to have new clients for their financing arm. They expanded the realm of that which could be leased and financed. By the end of the Jack Welch era, the point of General Electric was to grow bigger in order to supply more credit.

This financialization of the economy also allowed companies like General Electric to maintain implausible growth rates. This is where that credit machine at the heart of the company came into play. They could finance acquisitions with cheap credit. They could structure the purchase of a company in such a way as to realize its revenue now, while amortizing its debt and expenses. Suddenly that new division was wildly profitable through the miracle of off-balance sheet transactions.

The last financial crisis broke General Electric, by exposing a reality of the modern credit-based economy. Without new ways to move credit through the system, the credit system begins to seize up. Since the profit in this system is entirely through the skim, the slowing of credit means a collapse in profits. Once those profits disappear, the ability to make interest payments declines and that slows the system further. GE was close to insolvent within days of the mortgage crisis in 2008.

That is the real lesson of General Electric. The company became something like the old Mafia bust-outs. The whole point of the business was to squeeze every drop of value from clients and divisions. Instead of running up the credit lines and burning down the building for the insurance, General Electric turned the human capital of companies into lease and interest payments. They were not investing and creating, they were monetizing and consuming whatever it touched.

GE came close to collapse in the financial crisis, but they were bailed out. They stagger on, despite having lots of divisions that make high quality products. The cost of unwinding the company back into a normal company will be high, maybe too high for them to survive. The same can be said of the American economy. It will have to be unwound, but there will be no bailout. Instead, it will have to unwind quickly and painfully, in order to become a normal economy again.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Flynn File

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The General Flynn case, after years of judicial stalling, may be finally coming to an end, as a Federal appeals court ordered the presiding judge to dismiss the case. The presiding judge could appeal the ruling to the full court or even take it to the Supreme Court, but his chance for success is negligible. Most likely his appeal would be refused, but it would buy some time. He could also refuse to comply with the writ of mandamus or stall for time so his prosecutor can file his claims.

The case has been a microcosm of what is going on with our ruling class. The sheer pettiness of the process reflects a cultural attitude that exists in the ruling managerial elite that is not seen among the commoners. This meanness is all over the current revolutionary spasm. Mel Gibson was just cancelled again for something he may have said 25 years ago. No people hold a grudge like the chosen people and that sensibility is now an identifying feature of the managerial class.

In the Flynn case, whatever insults he committed against the Obama administration appear to be so minor that no one is sure they exist. Even the neocons are struggling to manufacturer an explanation for this years-long jihad against Flynn. Note that the torments they have inflicted on him were designed to keep the torment going for as long as they could do it. Instead of putting him in jail for a year, they were seeking to keep his case alive forever. Our ruling class is full of sadists.

Of course, there could be other reasons for trying to keep Flynn in limbo. This case has revealed the breathtaking corruption of the ruling class. We now know, for example, that Joe Biden and his son were extorting the Ukrainian government. Biden admitted as much several times. He threatened the Ukrainian government with loss of support if they did not allow his son to work a grift with their energy monopoly. Another feature of the managerial elite is shameless personal corruption.

There are other hints here that the delaying action in the Flynn case is an effort to cover up other things. The recently released notes from one of the conspirators in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election point the finger at Obama. Maybe keeping Flynn in legal jeopardy is part of a scheme to keep him quiet. That’s the other thing about this rotten ruling class. Nothing is ever on the level with these people and no grift is too small. They see us as suckers and chumps.

Another feature of current year America is on display here. That is the complete and total corruption of the law. General Flynn was framed. That is abundantly clear, but it will happen in any legal system. The issue here is that the judge has deliberately and maliciously dragged this case out as a form of torture. Judge Sullivan is more like an inquisitor, trying to extract a confession. The system bankrupted Flynn and ruined his life, mostly because he has come to be viewed as a heretic.

All over the court system we are seeing judges not only abandon their role as neutral arbiters of the rules, but aggressively promote their ideology. The judge in the Roger Stone case, for example, is an ethnocentric sadist. Compounding it, the managerial class is celebrating this new judicial temperament. The Wall Street Journal, an allegedly conservative operation, is celebrating the rise of racial paranoia and vengeance among the black members of the judiciary.

The Flynn case is not all bad news. It costs money to fight the system the way Flynn has done, which means someone is paying his bills. They are not just paying his lawyers, but also supporting him while he is in limbo. Since he has been de-platformed like every other enemy of the state, it means a rich guy is underwriting this long battle with the system. Not every plutocrat is happy with what is happening. A balkanization of the ruling class is slowly underway.

There’s also the fact that the people running this particular scheme and many of the others associated with the scandal are not very smart. The prior generation of rulers would have found a more efficient way of dealing with a problem like Flynn. They probably would have bribed him with a position in the system. No man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder. The Keystone Cops now running the FBI and CIA are simply too stupid to be effectively crooked.

Of course, as is often the case, this issue reveals the yawning divide between the commoner and the ruling class. The commoner looks at this and sees it for what it is and is happy the appeals court upheld their rules. The ruling class, in contrast, thinks the application of the law is a violation of the rule of law. In the madhouse world of the managerial class, the consistent application of the rules is somehow a violation of the rules, undermining the principle of the law.

It is a good and necessary reminder that the ruling class is well beyond reform, because they have been afflicted with a strange new religion. They are angry at the Flynn result on moral grounds, not legal ones. For them, those laws written on paper are your laws and subordinate to their laws, their moral laws. In this case, they just see a heretic and blasphemer escaping punishment. That must be wrong. The managerial class is becoming the domain of howling lunatics.

Finally, what the Flynn case reveals is the fragility of the elites. Their constant lashing out at the public is driven by a deep fear that they sit atop a house of cards. Their lunacy is really just a manifestation of this constant terror. The managerial elite is a bourgeois elite; thus, it suffers from bourgeois angst. That angst has now metastasized into a neurosis masquerading as a moral code. The Great Panic we are witnessing is another indication that the managerial elite is in crisis.

That’s why the book White Fragility is an instant success with the ruling class. On the surface, the message to white people is “stop being so insecure and face up to your own racism.” Below the surface, there lies the fear, “My good, if they ever find out the truth, we’re all dead.” The endless white-lashing is a defense mechanism by people who see themselves standing on the trapdoor of the scaffold. One day, perhaps soon, their fears will be realized and the trap door will swing open.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Noosening

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For those on this side of the great divide, the NASCAR noose hoax played out in an unexpected fashion. Instead of the fraud going undetected for a month until some clever sleuth uncovered the truth, this time the hoax was revealed in real-time. Usually the Left is better at concealing the truth long enough for another hoax to come along and push the first hoax down the memory hole. That way, anyone talking about the old hoax is charged with being a racist conspiracy theorist.

This time it was different, as the FBI flew in an army of investigators to hunt down the racist before he could noose again. Why they responded with 15 agents is a question no one will bother to ask them. Did they really think this was true? Do they swing into action like this for every noose warning? Did Bill Barr suspect a hoax and send the FBI in to expose it before it could be forgotten? All of these reasons seem unlikely, but the FBI responded with overwhelming force for a reason.

Putting that aside, the absurdity of this hoax bears some examination. The supposed cause of the panic was a garage door pull-down that had been there probably since the last garage door pull-down was replaced. The old one, most likely, looked a lot like the new ones as it is a common thing. Whoever claimed it was a noose was either extremely stupid, insane or so filled with a sense of entitlement that he just assumed everyone had to accept his story about the noose.

There is a strong possibility that the truth is something different. These facilities are not open to the public. They have lots of security. In this age that means cameras recording everything that moves 24-hours per day. There is a good chance the footage made clear that there was never a noose in the garage, so they quickly came up with the story about the garage door pull-downs. It’s better to be thought a moron than to having to admit to being a fraudster. Just look at Jussie Smollett.

That is a useful comparison for lots of reasons, but the one to watch here is how Wallace reacts to being outed as a fraud. As of now, he is taking the Smollett approach and demanding you believe him rather than your lying eyes. It is one of those examples where you see how extreme entitlement is what is driving this stuff. Wallace has lived a charmed life, but he assumes he is entitled to more. So much more, in fact, that anyone who dares say “no” to him must be evil.

It is an unexpected result of the Left’s weaponization of blacks against normal white people the last 70 years. They have always expected blacks to be a pit bull on a chain they can use to terrorize white people. For the most part that has been the case, but blacks have been internalizing Progressive race speech to the point where they have come to see themselves as a sacred people. The endless doting and fawning has convinced them they are exempt from the rules.

This is most evident with successful blacks. Every black athlete walks around with a chip on his shoulder. NBA players carry on like they are being forced to work the fields, when in reality they live like nobility. No group of blacks complains more than NBA players, despite having so much. This is something you see to vary degrees with all high achieving blacks. The endless adulation from their masters on the Left has led blacks to obsess over their own blackness.

It is that sense of entitlement that keeps the hoax game going. That and there is rarely any consequence to the people promoting these hoaxes. The pint-sized pundit, Ben Shapiro, will never have to explain himself. He got to feel like a hero when he instinctively condemned all white people. Then he gets to be smug, while pretending he was never fooled by the hoax. He’s not alone. All of Conservative Inc. plays the same role in every one of these hoaxes. It’s their job.

The Left, of course, needs these hoaxes to feed the engines of the rage machine, so they are more than happy to indulge black fantasies about oppression. They will be out their washing the feet when some NFL team is forced to sign Colin Kaepernick to a contract this summer. They will get to feel vindicated. Then when he can’t play, they can blame racism for his benching. In the skins game, the Left is the house and the house always wins, which is why they never close the game.

That brings us back to Wallace. Like Kaepernick, he is destined to be a mediocre performer in his sport, who got a big leg up because he is black. In other words, his best asset has always been white guilt. The path forward for him is the same as with Kaepernick, which means militant anti-white agitation. Look for him to start issuing demands to NASCAR and other drivers. He will expect exemptions to the rules and when they don’t come, he will cry “racism!”

The irony is we will end up with something close to what the Left calls white privilege, but it will be for blacks. The Left has claimed for years that white people out-perform all others because they get to play by a different set of rules. This was always nonsense, but it is what we will get with negrophilia. Blacks will be given a pass on the rules and loaded with benefits and praise. They are quickly becoming a race of spoiled children, around whom society is organized to keep them happy.

Whether or not such a world can last is another matter. NASCAR has done everything it can to placate the blacks. Will their fans find a way to swallow the humiliation and stick with the sport? Will the NFL be able to humiliate its fans and survive. There are plenty of broken white people, so it is possible, but there does seem to be an awakening among whites too. Whether they know it or not, the race hoaxers have opened a debate among white people about what it means to be white.

For those on this side of the great divide, this is the way to see it. For the first time in generations white people are thinking about race, rather than emoting about it. Lots of white people are wondering if they want to live in the same world as people demanding they wash the feet. Many will kneel, but many will not. This is something that always had to happen. If it means the death of sports entertainment, it is small price to be paid for the freedom to decide for ourselves.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Paradox Of The Market

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An axiom of liberal democracy is that the more open the system the more choices there are within the system. A market for widgets, if it is an open market, will have the maximum number of widget makers and widget suppliers. The marketplace of ideas, if it is open to all, will have the full range of ideas. Similarly, as long as the demand side is unrestricted, the full spectrum of demand will be represented. Every widget buyer will have the chance to demand his type of widget.

This is the starting point for modern societies. It is no longer a point to be debated and certainly not questioned. This is obvious in the non-debate over tech censorship. Any effort to discuss what is going on with companies like Google and Twitter is met with a wall of sound about the sanctity of private firms operating in the market. “Build your own platform” has become the top single in the amen chorus. The marketplace is now a god that provides what the people need and deserve.

In theory, the chorus should be right. If everyone who wants to make widgets is allowed to make widgets, then there should be a widget maker for every type of widget demanded by the public, assuming the widget can be produced at a profit. Even people wanting free widgets could be supplied by charity. Outside of the extremes, if there is a way to make a profit by meeting even the most bizarre demands for a product or service, someone will find a way to meet that demand.

Something similar should happen in public discourse. If the public space is open, then everyone can present their ideas. If everyone is free to listen, or not listen, to those ideas being offered up, the marketplace should develop in the same way as it should with a product or a service. The insane ideas will have a small audience, while the sensible ideas will gain a larger audience. The marketplace of ideas will sort and stack the ideas on offer based on the preferences of the audience.

This is a bit redundant, but it is important to think about this axiom of liberal democracy while considering current reality. If the market place for goods and services functioned as believed, then we would have more than two mobile phone makers. There would be more than one search engine. We would have lots of small car makers, rather than a handful of global operators. In fact, General Motors should have gone out of business decades ago based on market principles.

In the realm of ideas, we should have a dozen political parties flourishing to one degree or another at the state and national level. For example, there is no obvious reason why there should not be political parties that operate just as the state level. According to the axioms of liberal democracy, there should be state parties that focus just on state and local issues, maybe operating as a feeder to a national party. Yet, we have just two parties that are really just two faces of a single party.

It is a paradox of markets that the internal dynamic of the market leads to fewer choices and maybe even no choice. Take the desktop computer market, for example. The only choice is the color and the label of the Chinese slave camp that produced it. Inside, the parts all come from the same source. Alternatives to the standard PC are fringe options that exist for hobbyists and weirdos. You see this everywhere you look around the marketplace. Our markets are oligopolies now.

It goes beyond market consolidation. Another aspect of this is that as some dominant players emerge, they begin to insulate themselves from demand. In fact, it is possible that the quest for market domination is actually an effort to insulate the supplier from the pressures of the marketplace. The players initially experiencing success shift from competing for clients to competing to wall off their share of demand in order to prevent others from competing for that market share.

You see this with sports. The NASCAR phenomenon is assumed to be driven by the edicts of this weird new religion that has gripped the great and good. That may be one aspect of it, maybe even the primary aspect, but there also seems to be a desire to get rid of their own audience. That is, NASCAR would be fine with not having a live crowd and depending entirely on television money. Then they no longer have to be responsive to the demands of the customers.

The temptation here is to say that the fans will not watch, but in the realm of television these days, ratings matter very little. ESPN, for example, gets the bulk of its revenue from mandatory cable fees. If you have a TV sub through the local cable monopoly or a service like Hulu, you pay ESPN eight dollars per month. It does not matter if you watch, you pay the fee. All cable channels work off this model. Once again, the glory of the market place is to result in a monopoly and no market.

This dynamic where the dominant suppliers seek to eradicate the demand side is evident in politics. Both faces of the uniparty are now onboard with vote by mail, for example, which eliminates the pesky demands of the voters. This form of voting makes for unlimited fraud, so we will end up with Stalin’s maxim. “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” Since picking one party or the other has no effect on policy, voting will soon be entirely ceremonial.

It is always tempting to confuse a paradox with a contradiction. Critics of modern capitalism, for example, will claim that the oligarchs are not really capitalist in the free market sense. They are corrupting the system. Similarly, people will claim that the problem with politics is that a small group of highly corrupt people are subverting the democratic system. In other words, the axioms of the market place are true, it’s just that the current systems are not adhering to them.

The trouble with this line of reasoning is it suggests that the marketplace itself selects for the sorts of people who seek to subvert the marketplace. Everywhere we look, the great experiment in open markets has had the same result. Whether it is finance, technology, ideas or politics, the result is small club that controls everything, not only to their exclusive benefit, but to the detriment of the people they allegedly serve. It is almost as if the market selects for sadists who despise their customers.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Systemic Collapse

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Note: I will be on with Joseph Cotto and Paul Gottfried this evening to discuss big-brained stuff. The show is scheduled for 7:00 PM. This is a link to their YouTube page, but I’ll add a direct link when it is available. One topic will be my post about America and Athens, but there will be other topics as well.

One thing that seems to be true of all civilizations that are in crisis is they have a period in which the laws are no longer respected by the people in power. It is not exactly a period of lawlessness, as in chaos. That certainly does happen when the crisis reaches the point when the official authority can no longer project power. Before that, there is a time when the people charged with enforcing the laws simply stop doing it on a consistent basis. The law becomes arbitrary and selective.

A good example of this is what we see with the civil unrest. Mobs of people go into the streets looting and rioting, with very little push-back from the police. The politicians carry on as if they are in support of the rioting. It’s not as if these mobs are that large or all that fearsome. The police, if given the chance, could end the riots in a few hours with a minimum of trouble. The people pulling down statues could be arrested, charged with lots of crimes and sent to a prison. Yet, it does not happen.

Part of it, for sure, is that the local politicians are taking some weird pleasure in seeing their cities destroyed. They would like to join in on the mayhem. That is obvious with the child mayor of Minneapolis. In other cases, the local politicians hate the police and refuse to let them do their jobs. Still, in many cases, the local government is paralyzed by fear and incompetence. In Atlanta, the police are in open revolt against the local authorities over the corruption of the law by the politicians.

Lost in all struggles to advance a preferred narratives is what is happening on the ground in these cities. If you are a shop owner in these areas or a resident, you now live in a lawless age. Again, it is not entirely lawless, but the law is no longer clear and predictable for you. If you, as a shop owner, shoot someone looting your store, maybe you get arrested. Maybe the looter gets arrested, if things fall the right way, but you can’t know. The law is no longer clear.

A more ominous example is what we see happening with the Silicon Valley oligopolies now controlling the public square. Recently, Google threatened to end the advertising revenue of the Federalist and Zero Hedge. They did this at the behest of NBC, who called them up and asked them to do it, because NBC did not like that they allowed users to post comments on the stories. Google does not like people expressing their opinions either, so they happily agreed to threaten both sites.

There is a term for this. It is called extortion. Using the threat of force or property damage to obtain something from another is illegal in every state. What Google and NBC did to these sites is no different than what the Mafia used to do with local business. NBC said, “that’s a nice business you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it.” Then Google came in and smashed a few things to make sure both of them knew they were serious about it.

What’s even more amazing about this story is both NBC and Google have publicly bragged about what they did. They don’t dispute that they essentially muscled these two sites like gangsters. Their public utterances are enough for the FBI to arrest the people involved and charge them with multiple counts of extortion. They could probably even begin a racketeering case against Google. There are laws on the books for exactly this situation, yet the government is silent on the matter.

A less egregious example is what we see with the tech companies de-platforming people accused of impiety. In a better time, one-way contracts were strongly discouraged and highly scrutinized by the courts. It was assumed there was an unequal relationship between the company and their customer. The court tried to balance that relationship by heavily scrutinizing the contracts involved and the actions of the company issuing the contracts. The court defended the customer.

The reverse is now true. In every area of life, people are confronted by terms of service that run contrary to our legal traditions. Domain registrars, for example, willy-nilly break their contract with users like VDare. There is no remedy, as the courts simply no longer enforce large swaths of contract law. In fact, as we see with the Supreme Court, they invent new laws and re-imagine history to justify it. The courts are now something less predictable than a flip of a coin. It’s chaos in the law.

It is tempting to explain all of this as part of some highly orchestrated plot by the usual suspects, but in reality, we are in a period of lawlessness. The people charged with enforcing the rules either refuse for factional reasons or they simply can no longer project the power they theoretically possess. In the case of the courts, it very well may be fear from people with real power. John Roberts, for example, is most likely being extorted or intimidated by powerful people.

In response to legitimate power failing to act, illegitimate power is starting to step into the void and enforce its own rules. We see this with so-called private companies trying to impose the new religion on people. The NCAA, for example, is trying to force the state of Mississippi to change its flag. Again, it is resorting to extortion and doing so without regard for the law. A big part of what they are doing is displaying their power level by brazenly threatening the duly elected government.

What we are witnessing is not a revolution. The Left would love for people to believe that, which is why they have instructed conservative media to sell that idea. Instead, we are seeing the breakdown of order. Government, either because of corruption or ineptitude, is no longer able to enforce the laws. Private power centers, no longer respecting the spirit of the laws or the legitimate power centers, are beginning to fill this void, like gangs trying to impose order when the cops are gone.

The public sees this only from the outsider point of view. The legitimate power centers like state and local government, appear to be functioning, but for some reason they are randomly failing in their basic duties. Corporations and newly minted religious authorities are suddenly able to push people around without consequence. To the average citizen it does look like a revolution, and maybe that will come, but for now it is the slow breakdown of order. The system is collapsing.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Sunset Of Trump

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President Trump kicked off his re-election campaign with a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma on Saturday night. The most remarked feature of the event was the tiny crowd that bothered to show up. Even the Breitbart zombies could not help but notice that the arena was about a third of capacity. The other remarkable feature is that Trump pretty much used recycled material from the past, rather use the event to reframe his flailing election campaign. It was very low energy.

In fairness, the run-up to the event was marred by the mayor declaring a state of emergency, along with warnings that mobs of Antifa would be there to beat people trying to enter the arena. Even the dumbest white people are starting to realize that the police are there to protect the Left and their masters, so going to an event like this means running a gauntlet of protesters, while the cops cheer it on. Trump can forget about holding rallies this summer. The Left will not permit it.

Still, there is a marked lack of enthusiasm for Trump. By the standards of his rhetoric, his presidency has been a spectacular failure. His two great achievements are throwing open the prisons so violent blacks can prey on his voters and massive give-sways to the super-rich and global pirates. If you voted for Trump because of immigration, you have gotten less than nothing from him. Immigration has increased, work visas have increased and he bungled DACA into a permanent program.

The worst aspect of Trump and the one that will probably cost him the election is he keeps endorsing the morality of his opponents. In one breath he tells his voters he will fight the Left. In the next breath he tells them the Left is standing on the moral high ground and he worships at their feet. DACA is a perfect example. He could have rescinded it and been done with it. Instead he spent years telling us he cared more about these invaders than the Democrats. The court believed him.

If Trump was actually fighting for his issues, his lack of accomplishment could be turned into an asset. People can respect a guy who keeps fighting against a system that is as thoroughly corrupt as Washington. That’s not the case here. Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for Senate, hired John Bolton, opposes Jeff Sessions. He has spent his entire time in office singing the praises of blacks, Hispanics and migrants, while never mentioning white people, the people who voted for him.

At this point, a reasonable person has to wonder if Trump was not a Manchurian candidate all along. If in 2016 you were hoping to derail white populism one more time as you slammed the prison doors shut, what would you do different? Millions of white man hours were invested in Trump that could have gone to building a second party or building a legitimate alternative to the ruling class. Trump was actually a delaying action all along, so the ruling class could finish their work.

Now, a lot will happen in the next four and half months, so it is foolish to write-off Trump completely at this point. He is running against a dementia patient. Lost in all the tumult of late is the fact that Biden has declined even further since we last saw him. By the fall the choice could very well be a terrible disappointment or a man unsure of where he is at the moment. That and the background could be blacks looting and burning white neighborhoods in the suburbs while the cops laugh about it.

Trump can also help his cause by firing the Hillary Clinton supporter he has running his campaign at the moment. That’s right. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, did not vote for him in 2016. He could also sideline the Chabad agent assigned to him. That would be Jared Kushner, the genius mind behind throwing open the prison doors so BLM can riot in the streets. Kushner really does resemble a lizard person, so maybe Alex Jones is right about that one.

A campaign centered on reviving the economy and restoring law and order would at least have some coherence. He could then run against both parties as responsible for the mayhem we are seeing. It would be cynical and dishonest, but it would probably work to re-energize his campaign. It would also force Biden to defend the establishment and the current mayhem. Forcing Dementia Joe to speak in public should be Trump’s number one priority throughout the summer.

Whether or not Trump does anything to save himself is an open question at this point, as he looks like a beaten man. His rally in Tulsa was a dud and it was clear he knew it as soon as he waddled on the stage. He was once again setup to fail by people around him, people who worked hard to prevent him from winning in 2016. At this stage, it would be remarkable if Trump realized he has to stop trusting his enemies and doubting his friends. It’s possible, but the window is closing.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!